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PeakMetrics / Fact Checks

Religion & belief fact checks

Explore claims publishers have checked about religion & belief. Read their original ratings and follow the evidence.

3,371 published reviews in this topic

FACTLYReligion & belief

144 years old Buddhist monk

Publisher’s rating: FALSE

FACTLY examined a social-media post claiming that the Buddhist monk pictured was 144 years old. Its review identifies the man as LP Saur Kantiko and says the image’s age claim is wrong: the monk was 114, not 144. The excerpt’s stated conclusion is based on tracing the same image to an earlier Instagram post and the age stated in that post’s caption. FACTLY says it used Google Reverse Image Search to find the image on the Instagram account “magie.du.bouddha.” The account had uploaded it on 23 June 2019 with a caption describing the monk as 114 years old. The review also says the account’s website identifies the person bowing to the monk as a webmaster who travels to collect Buddhist amulets and objects, and that the same information appears on the account’s Facebook page. The excerpt does not describe an independent check of the monk’s age beyond this image provenance and account material.

FACTLYReligion & belief

A woman got converted herself from Hinduism into Islam and said a person can drink cow urine but cannot drink water from the hands of a Dalit in Hinduism.

Publisher’s rating: FALSE

The claim concerns a woman shown in a social-media image. It says she converted from Hinduism to Islam by choice because, in her account, Hinduism allows drinking cow urine but not water from a Dalit’s hands. FACTLY’s review directly examined that image and the attribution attached to it, rather than assessing the broader social comparison in isolation. To trace the image, the review says it used Google Reverse Image Search and found the photograph on a website called Hindu Existence. That site identified the woman as Jaya Bhandari and said she lived in Ranchi. The review then searched using that information and found a Hindustan Times report from 2015. According to FACTLY’s account of that report, Bhandari was forcibly converted by her second husband; the report also described her filing a police complaint about being forced to eat beef, assaulted, and having her name changed to Zoya Anwar. The decisive distinction is between the reason attributed to the woman in the viral post and what the review says the reporting about her actually recorded. FACTLY concludes that she said her husband forced her to convert and that she did not make the statement about double standards in Hinduism. The supplied excerpt describes the image-search and follow-up search, but does not include the underlying Hindustan Times article or the archived social-media post, so those materials cannot be independently assessed from this excerpt.

YouturnReligion & belief

பெண்டாட்டி புள்ள குடும்பம்…. ஆரோக்கியம் ஐஸ்வர்யம் ன்னு நினைப்பு வந்துட்டா…. அத்தி வரதரை தரிசனம் செய்து கோவிந்தா சொல்லு #தமிழா. இது மட்டும் வட இந்திய சாமி இல்லைடா. காஞ்சிபுர சாமியடா… புரியுதா #தமிழா

Publisher’s rating: Fake

FACTLYReligion & belief

Nita Ambani tweeted that any child takes birth as a Hindu but gets converted into Muslim by the outside world

Publisher’s rating: FALSE

The claim concerns a specific tweet attributed to Nita Ambani: “Any child takes birth as a Hindu but gets converted into Muslim by the outside world……”. FACTLY reports that the tweet did not come from an official account belonging to her. It says its search found that “she does not have any official Twitter account.” [S1: “Claim: Nita Ambani tweeted: ‘Any child takes birth as a Hindu but gets converted into Muslim by the outside world……’.”; “When searched for the account of Nita Ambani on Twitter, it was found that she does not have any official Twitter account.”] The review also checked the handle shown with the post, @NitaMambani. It reports that this account “has been suspended” and describes it as a fake handle, concluding that Nita Ambani did not tweet the statement. [S1: “when searched for the twitter handle (@NitaMambani) given in the post, it can be seen that the account ‘@NitaMambani’ has been suspended.”; “To sum it up, Nita Ambani did not tweet on religious conversion. It was from a fake Twitter handle.”] The evidence described is the lack of an official Nita Ambani Twitter account and the suspension of the specific handle associated with the post. The excerpt does not provide an archived tweet or further account-ownership records, so the explanation rests on the checks FACTLY says it performed. [S1: “When searched for the account of Nita Ambani on Twitter, it was found that she does not have any official Twitter account.”; “the account ‘@NitaMambani’ has been suspended.”]

Deutsche Presse-AgenturReligion & belief

Zu einem Foto des Ratsvorsitzenden der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland (EKD), Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, wird der folgende Text in sozialen Netzwerken und auf Blogs verbreitet: «Diese Kinderehen sind doch nicht das Problem von heute. Das haben wir immer sehr liberal gehandhabt. Wir müssen eher klare Kante gegen RECHTS zeigen.» Obwohl der Text nicht als Zitat gekennzeichnet ist, werden die Worte wegen der Aufmachung dem Ratsvorsitzenden in den Mund gelegt.

Publisher’s rating: Diese Sätze hat Heinrich Bedford-Strohm nicht von sich gegeben. Das bestätigte die EKD-Pressestelle auf Nachfrage der Deutschen Presse-Agentur.

The claim concerns a social-media text placed alongside a photograph of EKD council chair Heinrich Bedford-Strohm. The text presents three statements about child marriages and taking a firm stand against the political right as his words. The dpa investigation reports that the EKD press office denied he had said them, and identifies the photo as one taken outside the Lutherhaus in Eisenach, Thuringia, on 30 October 2016. The source says Bedford-Strohm spoke there shortly before the start of the 2017 Reformation year about a revised Luther Bible. The press office’s account distinguishes the three sentences rather than treating them as one quotation. Its spokesperson said Bedford-Strohm had said neither of the first two sentences at that event or at any other time. The spokesperson described the third sentence as consistent with the EKD’s position, but that does not establish that he said the wording attributed to him in the post. The source contrasts the circulating wording with a documented statement from Bedford-Strohm’s November 2016 council report. There, he called for a firm stand against efforts to make “völkisches” thinking and far-right campaign rhetoric socially acceptable again. That is related in subject to the post’s final sentence, but is not the same wording; the source’s account therefore supports distinguishing the genuine statement from the text placed on the image.